Guantánamo for kids
Anna Perera's novel for teenagers about the notorious American detention camp is a gruelling imaginative journey. She tells Michelle Pauli how and why she made it

Michelle Pauli writing in the guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 3 March 2009

A US military guard stands at Camp Delta detention compound in Guantánamo Bay in 2006. Photograph: Brennan Linsley/AP

Guantánamo Bay's days may be numbered, with President Obama's pledge to close the detention camp, and prisoners trickling home, but children's writer Anna Perera is determined that teenagers, at least, will understand the full horror of the human rights abuses that took place in the name of the "war on terror".

Guantánamo Boy
by Anna Perera
Puffin,
£6.99

Perera is the author of Guantánamo Boy, a novel that pulls no punches in its depiction of the torture, isolation and injustices suffered by prisoners at the notorious camp.

The book focuses on Khalid, an ordinary 15-year-old from Rochdale who spends his time playing computer games, hanging out with his mates in the park and wishing he had the guts to tell his Irish classmate Niamh that he fancies her. However, within days of arriving in Karachi on a family visit to relatives, Khalid's life turns into a Kafkaesque nightmare when he is abducted from his aunt's house and ends up being held for two years, without charge, in the world's most notorious prison.
It sounds unlikely but, according to Perera, it is well-established that juveniles have been held at Guantánamo, although the numbers are disputed. Reprieve, the charity for prisoners from death row to Guantánamo, has recorded that 22 under-16s have been held at the camp. The youngest juvenile still in custody is Mohammed el Gharani, who was 14 when picked up in a random raid on a mosque by Pakistani bounty-hunters and "sold" to the American authorities for $5,000.

It was stories like these that Guantánamo Boy is based on, although the book itself emerged out of just one line delivered by the human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith at a benefit event for Reprieve in 2006.
"At that gig Clive Stafford Smith simply said 'children are also held in Guantánamo Bay' and that one statement inspired this novel," says Perera. "The title came to me immediately. At that point I began reading and researching on a daily basis and formed an opinion and a story."

Read the full piece at the Guardian online.